Sealed off, Gazans struggle daily

Israeli restrictions put medical care, basic needs at risk

December 17, 2007|By Scott Wilson, The Washington Post

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — The batteries are the size of a button on a man's shirt, small silvery dots that power hearing aids for several hundred Palestinian students taught by the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children in Gaza City.

Now the batteries are all but used up. The few that are left are losing power, turning voices into unintelligible echoes in the ears of 20 1st-grade students.

The Israeli government is increasingly restricting the import into the Gaza Strip of batteries, anesthesia drugs, antibiotics, tobacco, coffee, gasoline, diesel fuel and other basic items.

This seal has reduced Gaza, a territory of almost 1.5 million people, to beggar status, unable to maintain an effective public health system, administer public schools or preserve the pleasures of everyday life.

"Essentially, it's the ordinary people, caught up in the conflict, paying the price for this political failure," said John Ging, director of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, which serves the majority refugee population. "The humanitarian situation is atrocious, and it is easy to understand why -- 1.2 million Gazans now relying on UN food aid, 80,000 people who have lost jobs and the dignity of work. And the list goes on."

Israeli military and political leaders say the restrictions are prompted by near-constant rocket and small-arms attacks.

The latest such attack came Sunday, when a rocket fired by militants from Gaza wounded a 2-year-old boy in an Israeli community on the Gaza border.

The Israeli cordon tightened in June, when Hamas, a radical Islamic movement at war with Israel, seized control of Gaza. Israeli officials have insisted to the Bush administration that no humanitarian crisis would result from the sanctions imposed on the territory.

But for Gazans, caught between Israel's concrete gun towers and the Mediterranean, the sense of crisis is pervasive as they struggle to keep their homes intact, buy food and educate their children.

"I hold every man, woman and child in Israel responsible for this," said Geraldine Shawa, 64, the Chicago-born director of the Atfaluna Society. A tall, imposing woman who has lived in Gaza for 36 years, Shawa has watched the fortunes of her students squeezed in recent months by what she calls Israel's practice of collective punishment.

The plight of the deaf children resembles in some ways the larger estrangement of Gaza.

Work is rare. Food is scarce. In the rank, crowded wards of Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, the dispensary is out of 85 essential medicines and close to using up almost 150 others.

The minister of health, Bassem Naim, said in an interview that he is husbanding a two-week stock of anesthetic at a time when Israel is threatening to mount a military offensive into Gaza to end the rocket fire.

"They have turned Gaza into an animal farm -- we only are allowed to get what keeps us alive," he said.

Since June, Naim said, more than three dozen Palestinians seeking treatment for cancer and other critical illnesses at Israel's more advanced hospitals were rejected for passage by Israeli security agencies. The Israeli non-profit group Physicians for Human Rights estimates the number of rejections "in the tens."

Now rolling blackouts have begun across the strip, partly because the Palestinian Authority refused for days last week to pay the Israeli company that supplies fuel to Gaza.

The Authority has since paid its bills, but Israel has limited daily diesel deliveries.

Maj. Peter Lerner, Israel's military liaison for international organizations working in Gaza, said last week that he would contact the International Committee of the Red Cross to make sure hearing-aid batteries would be allowed through the crossings.

A spokeswoman for the Atfaluna Society said none had been received so far.